Happy birthday Robert E Lee!
The Unknown Martin Luther King, Jr.
Benjamin J. Ryan, American Renaissance, January 2008
Forty years after his death, the popularity of Martin Luther King
remains extraordinary. He is perhaps the single most praised person in
American history, and millions adore him as a hero and almost a saint.
The federal government has made space available on the Mall in
Washington for a national monument for King, not far from Lincoln’s.
Only four men in American history have national monuments: Washington,
Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt; and now King will make five.
King is the only American who enjoys the nation’s highest honor of
having a national holiday on his birthday. There are other days of
remembrance such as Presidents’ Day, but no one else but Jesus Christ
is recognized with a similar holiday. Does King deserve such honors?
Much that has been known to scholars for years—but largely unknown to
most Americans—suggests otherwise.
Plagiarism
As a young man, King started plagiarizing the work of others and he continued this practice throughout his career.
At Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he
received a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951, many of his papers
contained material lifted verbatim and without acknowledgement from
published sources. An extensive project started at Stanford University
in 1984 to publish all of King’s papers tracked down the original
sources for these early papers and concluded that his academic writings
are “tragically flawed by numerous instances of plagiarism.” Journalist
Theodore Pappas, who has also reviewed the collection, found one paper
showing “verbatim theft” in 20 of a total of 24 paragraphs. He writes:
“King’s
plagiarisms are easy to detect because their style rises above the
level of his pedestrian student prose. In general, if the sentences are
eloquent, witty, insightful, or pithy, or contain allusions, analogies,
metaphors, or similes, it is safe to assume that the section has been
purloined.”
King also plagiarized himself, recycling old term papers
as new ones. Some of his professors complained about sloppy references,
but they seem to have had no idea how extensively he was stealing
material, and his habits were well established by the time he entered
the PhD program at Boston University. King plagiarized one-third of his
343-page dissertation, the book-length project required to earn a PhD,
leading some to say he should be stripped of his doctoral degree. Mr.
Pappas explains that King’s plagiarism was a lifelong habit:“King’s
Nobel Prize Lecture was plagiarized extensively from works by Florida
minister J. Wallace Hamilton; the sections on Gandhi and nonviolence in
his ‘Pilgrimage’ speech were taken virtually verbatim from Harris
Wofford’s speech on the same topic; the frequently replayed climax to
the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech—the ‘from every mountainside, let freedom
ring’ portion—came from a 1952 address to the Republican National
Convention by a black preacher named Archibald Carey; and the 1968
sermon in which King prophesied his martyrdom was based on works by J.
Wallace Hamilton and Methodist minister Harold Bosley.”
Perhaps King had no choice but to use the words of others.
Mr. Pappas has found that on the Graduate Record Exam, King “scored in
the second-lowest quartile in English and vocabulary, in the lowest ten
percent in quantitative analysis, and in the lowest third on his
advanced test in philosophy.”
Adultery
King lived a double life. During the day, he would speak to large
crowds, quoting Scripture and invoking God’s will, and at night he
frequently had sex with women from the audience. “King’s habits of
sexual adventure had been well established by the time he was married,”
says Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown University, a King admirer. He
notes that King often “told lewd jokes,” “shared women with friends,”
and was “sexually reckless.” According to King biographer Taylor
Branch, during a long party on the night of January 6 and 7, 1964, an
FBI bugging device recorded King’s “distinctive voice ring out above
others with pulsating abandon, saying, “˜I’m f***ing for God!’”
Sex with single and married women continued after King married, and
on the night before his death, King had two adulterous trysts. His
first rendezvous was at a woman’s house, the second in a hotel room.
The source for this was his best friend and second-in-command, Ralph
Abernathy, who noted that the second woman was “a member of the
Kentucky legislature,” now known to be Georgia Davis Powers.
Abernathy went on to say that a third woman was also looking for
King that same night, but found his bed empty. She knew his habits and
was angry when they met later that morning. In response, writes
Abernathy, King “lost his temper” and “knocked her across the
bed. . . . She leapt up to fight back, and for a moment they were
engaged in a full-blown fight, with [King] clearly winning.” A few
hours later, King ate lunch with Abernathy and discussed the importance
of nonviolence for their movement.
To other colleagues, King justified his adultery this way: “I’m away
from home twenty-five to twenty-seven days a month. F***ing’s a form of
anxiety reduction.” King had many one-night stands but also grew close
to one of his girlfriends in a relationship that became, according to
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Garrow, “the emotional
centerpiece of King’s life.” Still, sex with other women remained “a
commonplace of King’s travels.”
In private, King could be extremely crude. On one FBI recording,
King said to Abernathy in what was no doubt a teasing remark, “Come on
over here, you big black motherf***er, and let me suck your d**k.” FBI
sources told Taylor Branch about a surveillance tape of King watching a
televised rerun of the Kennedy funeral. When he saw the famous moment
when Jacqueline Kennedy knelt with her children before her dead
husband’s coffin, King reportedly sneered, “Look at her. Sucking him
off one last time.”
Despite his obsession with sex and his betrayal of his own wife and
children, and despite Christianity’s call for fidelity, King continued
to claim the moral authority of a Baptist minister.
Whites
King stated that the “vast majority of white Americans are racist”
and that they refused to share power. His solution was to redistribute
wealth and power through reparations for slavery and racial quotas:
“No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the
exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the
centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the
bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. . . . The payment
should be in the form of a massive program by the government of
special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a
settlement.” Continued King, “Moral justification for such measures for
Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of
slavery.” He named his plan the Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged.
Some poor whites would also receive compensation because they were
“derivative victims of slavery,” but the welfare of blacks was his
central focus.
King has been praised, even by conservatives, as the great advocate
of color-blindness. They focus too narrowly on one sentence in his “I
Have a Dream” speech, in which he said he wanted to live in a nation
“where [my children] will not be judged by the color of their skin but
by the content of their character.” The truth is that King wanted
quotas for blacks. “f a city has a 30 percent Negro population,”
King reasoned, “then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have
at least 30 percent of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in
all categories rather than only in menial areas.”
One of King’s greatest achievements is said to have been passage of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the signing ceremony on July 2, he
stood directly behind President Lyndon Johnson as a key guest. The
federal agency created by the act, the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, now monitors hiring practices and ensures that King’s
desires for racial preferences are met.
Like liberals today, King denied racial differences. In a reply to
an interviewer who told him many Southern whites thought racial
differences were a biological fact, he replied:
“This
utterly ignorant fallacy has been so thoroughly refuted by the social
scientists, as well as by medical science, that any individual who goes
on believing it is standing in an absolutely misguided and diminishing
circle. The American Anthropological Association has unanimously
adopted a resolution repudiating statements that Negroes are
biologically, in innate mental ability or in any other way inferior to
whites.”
The conclusions to be drawn from his belief in
across-the-board equality were clear: failure by blacks to achieve at
the level of whites could be explained only by white oppression. As
King explained in one interview, “I think we have to honestly admit
that the problems in the world today, as they relate to the question of
race, must be blamed on the whole doctrine of white supremacy, the
whole doctrine of racism, and these doctrines came into being through
the white race and the exploitation of the colored peoples of the
world.” King predicted that “if the white world” does not stop this
racism and oppression, “then we can end up in the world with a kind of
race war.”
Communism
In his public speeches, King never called himself a communist,
instead claiming to stand for a synthesis of capitalism and communism:
“[C]apitalism fails to realize that life is social. Communism fails to
realize that life is individual. Truth is found neither in the rugged
individualism of capitalism nor in the impersonal collectivism of
communism. The Kingdom of God is found in a synthesis that combines the
truths of these two opposites.”
However, David Garrow found that in private King “made it clear to
close friends that economically speaking he considered himself what he
termed a Marxist.” Mr. Garrow passes along an account of a conversation
C.L.R. James, a Marxist intellectual, had with King: “King leaned over
to me saying, ‘I don’t say such things from the pulpit, James, but that
is what I really believe.’. . . King wanted me to know that he
understood and accepted, and in fact agreed with, the ideas that I was
putting forward—ideas which were fundamentally Marxist-Leninist. . . .
I saw him as a man whose ideas were as advanced as any of us on the
Left, but who, as he actually said to me, could not say such things
from the pulpit. . . . King was a man with clear ideas, but whose
position as a churchman, etc. imposed on him the necessity of reserve.”
J. Pius Barbour, a close friend of King’s at seminary, agreed that he
“was economically a Marxist.”
Some of King’s most influential advisors were Communists with direct
ties to the Soviet Union. One was Stanley Levison, whom Mr. Garrow
called King’s “most important political counselor” and “at Martin
Luther King’s elbow.” He organized fundraisers for King, counseled him
on tax issues and political strategy, wrote fundraising letters and his
United Packinghouse Workers Convention speech, edited parts of his
books, advised him on his first major national address, and prepped
King for questions from the media. Coretta Scott King said of Levison
that he was “[a]lways working in the background, his contribution has
been indispensable,” and Mr. Garrow says the association with Levison
was “without a doubt King’s closest friendship with a white person.”
What were Levison’s political views? John Barron is the author of
Operation SOLO, which is about “the most vital intelligence operation
the FBI ever had sustained against the Soviet Union.” Part of its work
was to track Levison who, according to Mr. Barron, “gained admission
into the inner circle of the communist underground” in the US. Mr.
Garrow, a strong defender of King, admits that Levison was “one of the
two top financiers” of the Communist Party of the United States
(CPUSA), which received about one million dollars a year from the
Soviet Union. Mr. Garrow found that Levison was “directly involved in
the Communist Party’s most sensitive financial dealings,” and
acknowledged there was first-hand evidence of Levison’s “financial link
to the Soviet Union.”
Hunter Pitts O’Dell, who was elected in 1959 to the national
committee, the governing body for the CPUSA, was another party member
who worked for King. According to FBI reports, Levison installed O’Dell
as the head of King’s New York office, and later recommended that
O’Dell be made King’s executive assistant in Atlanta.
King knew his associates were Communists. President Kennedy himself
gave an “explicit personal order” to King advising against his
“shocking association with Stanley Levison.” Once when he was walking
privately with King in the White House Rose Garden, Kennedy also named
O’Dell and said to King: “They’re Communists. You’ve got to get rid of
them.”
The Communist connections help explain why Attorney General Robert
F. Kennedy authorized the FBI to wiretap King’s home and office
telephones in October 1963. Kennedy, like his brother John, was deeply
sympathetic to King but also aware of the threat of communism.
Mr. Garrow tried to exonerate King of the charge of being a fellow
traveler by arguing that Levison broke with the CPUSA while he worked
for King, that is, from the time he met King in the summer of 1956
until King’s death in 1968. However, as historian Samuel Francis has
pointed out, an official break with the CPUSA does not necessarily mean
a break with the goals of communism or with the Soviet Union.
John Barron argues that if Levison had defected from the CPUSA and
renounced communism, he would not have associated with former comrades,
such as CP officials Lem Harris, Hunter Pitts O’Dell, and Roy Bennett
(Levison’s twin brother who had changed his last name). He was also
close to the highly placed KGB officer Victor Lessiovsky, who was an
assistant to the head of the United Nations, U Thant.
Mr. Barron asks why Lessiovsky would “fritter away his time and risk
his career . . . by repeatedly indulging himself in idle lunches or
amusing cocktail conversation with an undistinguished lawyer [Levison]
. . . who had nothing to offer the KGB, or with someone who had
deserted the party and its discipline, or with someone about whom the
KGB knew nothing? . . . And why would an ordinary American lawyer . . .
meet, again and again, with a Soviet assistant to the boss of the
United Nations?”
Other Communists who worked with King included Aubrey Williams,
James Dombrowski, Carl Braden, William Melish, Ella J. Baker, Bayard
Rustin, and Benjamin Smith. King also “associated and cooperated with a
number of groups known to be CPUSA front organizations or to be heavily
penetrated and influenced by members of the Communist Party—for
example, the Southern Conference Educational Fund; Committee to Secure
Justice for Morton Sobell; the United Electrical, Radio and Machine
Workers of America; the National Lawyers Guild; and the Highlander Folk
School.
The CPUSA clearly tried to influence King and his movement. An FBI
report of May 6, 1960 from Jack Childs, one of the FBI’s most
accomplished spies and a winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
for Intelligence, said that the CP “feels that it is definitely to the
Party’s advantage to assign outstanding Party members to work with the
[Martin] Luther King group. CP policy at the moment is to concentrate
upon Martin Luther King.”
As Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina concluded in a
Senate speech written by Francis, King’s alliance with Communists was
evidence of “identified Communists . . . planning the influencing and
manipulation of King for their own purposes.” At the same time, King
relied on them for speech writing, fundraising, and raising public
awareness. They, in turn, used his stature and fame to their own
benefit. Senator Helms cited Congressman John M. Ashbrook, a ranking
member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, who said:
“King has consistently worked with Communists and has helped give them
a respectability they do not deserve. I believe he has done more for
the Communist Party than any other person of this decade.”
Christianity
King strongly doubted several core beliefs of Christianity. “I was
ordained to the Christian ministry,” he claimed, but Stanford
University’s online repository includes King’s seminary writings in
which he disputed the full divinity of Jesus, the Virgin Birth, and the
Resurrection, suggesting that we “strip them of their literal
interpretation.”
Regarding the divine nature of Jesus, King wrote that Jesus was
godlike, but not God. People called Jesus divine because they “found
God in him” like a divinely inspired teacher, not because he literally
was God, as Jesus himself claimed. On the Virgin Birth, King wrote:
“First we must admit that the evidence for the tenability of this
doctrine is to [sic] shallow to convince any objective thinker. How
then did this doctrine arise? A clue to this inquiry may be found in a
sentence from St. Justin’s First Apology. Here Justin states that the
birth of Jesus is quite similar to the birth of the sons of Zeus. It
was believed in Greek thought that an extraordinary person could only
be explained by saying that he had a father who was more than human. It
is probable that this Greek idea influenced Christian thought.”
Concerning the Resurrection, King wrote: “In fact the external
evidence for the authenticity of this doctrine is found wanting.” The
early church, he says, formulated this doctrine because it “had been
captivated by the magnetic power of his [Jesus’] personality. This
basic experience led to the faith that he could never die. And so in
the pre-scientific thought pattern of the first century, this inner
faith took outward form.” Thus, in this view, Jesus’ body never rose
from the dead, even though according to Scripture, “And if Christ has
not been raised, your faith is futile.”
Two other essays show how King watered down Christianity. In one, he
wrote that contemporary mystery religions influenced New Testament
writers: “[A]fter being in contact with these surrounding religions and
hearing certain doctrines expressed, it was only natural for some of
these views to become part of their subconscious minds. . . . That
Christianity did copy and borrow from Mithraism cannot be denied, but
it was generally a natural and unconscious process rather than a
deliberate plan of action.” In another essay, King wrote that liberal
theology “was an attempt to bring religion up intellectually,” and the
introduction to the paper at the Stanford website says that King was
“scornful of fundamentalism.” King wrote that in fundamentalism the
Trinity, the Atonement, and the Second Coming are “quite prominent,”
but again, these are defining beliefs of Christianity.
Known and unknown
King is both known and unknown. Millions worldwide see him as a
moral messiah, and American schools teach young children to praise him.
In the United States there are no fewer than 777 streets named for him.
But King is also unknown because only a few people are aware of the
unsavory aspects of his life. The image most people have of King is
therefore cropped and incomplete.
In the minds of many, King towers above other Americans as a
distinguished orator and writer, but this short, 5"6' man often stole
the words of others. People believe he was a Christian, but he doubted
some of the fundamentals of the faith. Our country honors King, but he
worked closely with Communists who aimed to destroy it. He denied
racial differences, but fought for racial favoritism in the form of
quotas. He claimed to be for freedom, but he wanted to force people to
associate with each other and he promoted the redistribution of wealth
in the form of reparations for slavery. He quoted the ringing words of
the Bible and claimed, as a preacher, to be striving to be more like
Jesus, but his colleagues knew better.
Perhaps he, too, knew better. His closest political advisor, Stanley
Levison, said King was “an intensely guilt-ridden man” and his wife
Coretta also called him “a guilt-ridden man.” Levison said that the
praise heaped upon King was “a continual series of blows to his
conscience” because he was such a humble man. If King was guilt-ridden
might it have been because he knew better than anyone the wide gap
between his popular image and his true character?
The FBI surveillance files could throw considerable light on his
true character, but they will not be made public until 2027. On January
31, 1977, as a result of lawsuits by King’s allies against the FBI, a
US district judge ordered the files sealed for 50 years. There are
reportedly 56 feet of records—tapes, transcripts, and logs—in the
custody of the National Archives and Record Service.
Meanwhile, for those who seek to know the real identity of this
nearly untouchable icon, there is still plenty of evidence with which
to answer the question: Was Martin Luther King, Jr. America’s best and
greatest man?
Benjamin J. Ryan is working toward a PhD in Church-State Studies.
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(Posted on January 16, 2009)
